As George Leef points out in the previous post, the claim by Jamie Meriotis that education is necessarily the pathway to prosperity is wrong. The pathway is effective use of human capital. In many cases that includes getting a bachelor’s degree, but not always.

I urge readers to look at the two maps that Meriotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, provides in his Huffington Post article to show that education equals wealth.

One of them gives the education degree attainment of the single richest person in each state (just one person, by name). What does that tell us? Fourteen percent, by the way, are listed as dropouts.

The other shows the percentage of each state’s residents who have at least a two-year degree and the average income for the state. As far as I can tell, the connections are “all over the map.” They are meaningless unless one takes other factors, such as population growth, into account.

I don’t think that Meriotis is actually trying to make any substantive claims with his maps, however. Rather, he’s trying to get people to agree with him and he’s using colorful insignia to do it. He says as much: “These connections are important because the narrative around prosperity matters.”

It’s just a narrative.